Mike is a retired stock broker, and now published author of Gold Rush!. In addition, he is a freelance writer specializing in real estate, personal finance and home decor now writing from San Miguel, Mexico.

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Modern construction equipment and machinery now includes advanced technology for optimizing safety, efficiency and more; It’s called equipment telematics, and by using it you can remotely track information about your equipment.

The information you collect using equipment telematics helps improve machine utilization, reduces fuel and energy consumption, and even lessens the need for frequent maintenance and lengthy repair schedules.

James White has more about the new machine to machine wireless technology for construction.

Insurance commissioners won’t approve all companies ask for. Rates will rise modestly in some states. But the odds are your premium will cost a lot more next year.

Premiums for non-group policies rose 24.4 percent more last year than they would have without Obamacare, says the National Bureau of Economic Research.

Premiums in this market rose more after two years of Obamacare than in the 8 years preceding, sayseHealth Insurance, a private health exchange.

Despite subsidies for the industry of at least $16 billion, many insurers lose money. Far fewer signed up for Obamacare than they expected (and the administration claimed). Those who did sign up are older and sicker.

“Only about 40 percent of those eligible eventually signed up after two full open-enrollments,” insurance expert Robert Laszewski told the Washington Examiner. “Carriers need more like 75 percent.”

Subsidies for insurance companies mask the true cost, says Stephen Parente, director of the Medical Industry Leadership Institute. When they expire in 2017, premiums for the cheapest plan could rise nearly 100 percent for individuals, 50 percent for families, he says.

That’s on top of sky high deductibles. The average deductible for the cheapest Obamacare plan is about $5,180 for individuals, $10,500 for families – four times the IRS threshhold for a “high deductible” plan.

Patricia Wanderlich, who suffered a brain hemorrhage in 2011, skipped the brain scan she should have every year because her Obamacare policy has a $6,000 deductible.

“To spend thousands of dollars just making sure (my aneurysim) hasn’t grown?” Ms. Wanderlich told the New York Times. “I don’t have that money.”

About 25 percent of Americans with private insurance can’t afford to pay a mid-range deductible ($1,200 for individuals, $2,400 for families), the Wall Street Journal said in March.

People with a policy they can’t afford to use are no better off than the uninsured. Which may be why – despite the threat of fines – so few without insurance signed up for Obamacare.

About 75 percent of those who did are subsidized. Subsidies could end for people in 36 states if later this month the Supreme Court rules for plaintiffs in King v. Burwell.

As written, the ACA permits subsidies only for insurance purchased on exchanges “established by the state,” plaintiffs note.

That was a drafting error, politicians he quoted told New York Times reporter Robert Pear. They’re lying. The words “established by the state” appear 9 times in the ACA. No “drafting error” is repeated that often.

The words were inserted deliberately to induce states to set up exchanges, says MIT Prof. Jonathan Gruber, foremost architect of Obamacare, and Sen. Max Baucus, D-MT, who chaired the committee that drafted the ACA version that became law.

Mr. Pear mentioned neither – par for the biased course at the New York Times. Let’s see if the Supreme Court can avoid such blatant bias.

Obamacare is a cancer inside the body of health care in America — and it is metastasizing.

Nearly every promise Democrats made has been broken. The average family pays more (some much more) for insurance, not $2,500 less. About 9 million Americans (so far) have learned they can’t keep their health plan if they want to. Or their doctors.

Many employers say Obamacare is chiefly why 2.3 million fewer Americans have full time jobs than in 2007.

The ACA has hurt millions more than it’s helped. The worst is yet to come. President Obama delayed or altered (mostly illegally) unpopular provisions at least 50 times. If they’re implemented fully, up to 100 million who get insurance from their employers could have their policies cancelled, the American Enterprise Institute estimated.

As premiums and deductibles rise, and the job-killing employer mandate goes into effect, a “death spiral” – begun because so few healthy people have signed up – will accelerate. If the Supreme Court rules the ACA must be enforced as written, it would be a mercy killing.

Jack Kelly is a former Marine and Green Beret, and was the Deputy Assistant Secretary of the Air Force during the Reagan Administration. He is the national security writer for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.

According to Graham Summers of Phoenix Capital Research The Next Currency Crisis Has Begun.

Stocks have been boring for months now. They’ve gone almost nowhere since the start of the year.
The REAL action is in the currency markets.
The biggest news is the breakdown of the Japanese Yen. Normally it’s a big deal if a currency breaks a trendline that is over five years long.
The Yen just broke a 30 year trendline.

The significance of this cannot be overstated… one of the major world currencies has broken support dating back to the mid-80s. This sets the stage for a collapse to 60 if not 40 in the coming months.
The Yen collapse represents a 33%-50% currency collapse. It is nothing short of a hyperinflationary event.
The impact will be felt around the globe, most notably in Asia where other currencies will be in absolute chaos.
However, the Yen also is a major currency partner with the US Dollar and the Euro… and a Japanese currency collapse will be felt in those regions as well. Stocks will be the last asset class to “get it.”

If you are reading this before breakfast, please consider having an egg, yolk included.

Any day now, the US government will officially accept the advice to drop cholesterol from its list of “nutrients of concern” altogether. It wants also to “de-emphasise” saturated fat, given “the lack of evidence connecting it with cardiovascular disease.”

A sixty-year torrent of bad dietary advice is coming to an end.

This is a mighty U-turn, albeit long overdue and hedged in caveats. The evidence has been building for years that eating cholesterol does not cause high blood cholesterol. A 2013 review by the American Heart Association and the American College of Cardiology found “no appreciable relationship between consumption of dietary cholesterol and serum [blood] cholesterol”.

Cholesterol is not some vile poison but an essential ingredient of life, which makes animal cell membranes flexible and is the raw material for making hormones, like testosterone and estrogen. Your liver manufactures most of the cholesterol found in your blood from scratch, and adjusts for what you ingest, which is why diet does not determine blood cholesterol levels.

Lowering blood cholesterol by changing diet is all but impossible.

Nor is there any good evidence that high blood cholesterol causes atherosclerosis, coronary heart disease or shorter life. It is not even a risk factor in people who have already had heart attacks. In elderly people – i.e., those who have the most heart attacks – the lower your blood cholesterol, the greater your risk of death. Likewise in children.

From the very first, the studies that linked the ingestion of cholesterol and saturated animal fats to cardiovascular disease were not just flawed, but fraudulent.

In the 1950s, an upsurge in heart disease in American men (probably caused mostly by smoking) led the physiologist Ancel Keys to guess that dietary cholesterol was to blame. When that seemed not to fit, he switched to saturated fat as a cause of high blood cholesterol.

To make his case he did things like leave out contradictory data, shift points on graphs and skate over inconvenient facts. He then got big charities and state agencies on side and bullied his critics into silence.

His most famous study, the seven-country study, started out much larger; he dropped 16 countries from the sample to get a significant correlation. Add them back in and it vanishes. Hidden in his data is the fact that people in Corfu and Crete (both Greek islands) ate the same amounts of saturated fats, but the Cretans died 17 times more frequently of heart attacks.

In the 1970s, the famous Framingham Heart Study stumbled on the fact that people with high cholesterol over the age of 47 (long before most people have heart attacks) lived longer than those with low cholesterol, and that those whose cholesterol dropped faced higher risk of death. But the consensus ignored this and sailed on.

If challenged to show evidence for low-cholesterol advice, the medical and scientific profession has tended to argue from authority – by pointing to WHO guidelines or other such official compendia, and say “check the references in there”. But those references lead back to Keys and other such dodgy dossiers.

Thus does bad science get laundered into dogma. “One of the great commandments of science is ‘Mistrust arguments from authority’,” said Carl Sagan. (Obviously a commandment many in the climate science community ignore.)

Eventually, the medical profession began to distinguish between cholesterol and the proteins that carried it, with a distinction emerging between “good” high-density lipoproteins (HDL), and “bad” low-density ones (LDL).

The fatty plaques in arteries are made partly of cholesterol, true, but they form on scars and irregularities caused by other problems: smoking, infections, damage, age. The lipoproteins and cholesterol are part of the repair kit.

You don’t blame a fire engine for a fire. We’ve confused effect with cause.

The battle is not over. The medics and scientists who have been insisting for 20 years that the cholesterol emperor has no clothes, and that low-carb, high-fat diets are safer, have been ostracized as quacks and flat-earthers for so long that the habit will die hard.

A scientific consensus can be very intolerant of heretics. Just look at how “deniers” of man-made global warming are treated as on the moral level of Holocaust deniers.

Nonetheless, the medical establishment here too is tiptoeing away from its previous advice to avoid eating cholesterol and saturated fat. It is covering the retreat with a smokescreen, redirecting its fire on trans fats (with more justification), or on sugar.

That’s what lies behind all this talk about the dangers of sugar these days – a huge paradigm shift away from the low-fat, low-cholesterol diet.

And indeed, the evidence that insisting on low-fat diets caused people to eat more carbohydrates, and that led to the explosion in obesity and diabetes, looks pretty strong – so far. After all, the main route by which the body lays down fat is to manufacture it from excess sugar in the liver.

But why did carbohydrate consumption start to increase so rapidly in the 1960s? At least partly because of the advice to avoid meat and cheese. Obesity and diabetes are the price we have paid for getting fat and cholesterol so wrong.

How about a full, drains-up inquiry into how the medical and scientific profession made such an epic blunder and caused so much misery to people?

Consider not just the damage that was done to people’s lives by faulty advice, but to the livelihoods of dairy and beef farmers and egg producers. Which has more sugar: an apple or an egg?

But what about statins? In men they lower cholesterol and they prevent heart disease. True, but the connection is not necessarily causal. Statins do a lot of other things, including reducing inflammation, which may be why they deter heart attacks.

There are statin skeptics such as Dr. Kendrick, who think the side-effects of taking them are not worth it, and that far too much of the evidence in favor of them comes from the pharmaceutical industry (see his book linked above).

We like to think clinging stubbornly to dogmas was a habit of doctors in past centuries, but it still goes on. Medicine needs to get better at changing its mind.

Matt Ridley is the author of The Rational Optimist, and as 5th Viscount Ridley is a Member of the British House of Lords.